That's right. Although there is an interesting thing to consider: if you look at page 13 of the deck they shared on Wednesday[1], it says 56% of SVB's total loans are in the form of lines of credit issued to PE/VC funds, secured by their LP commitments. I imagine many if not most of those are fairly small in size, but it's possible some funds took out much larger lines of credit, secured by their future LP commitments, and were holding that cash at SVB. So we could definitely see some funds affected to varying extents.
What is this? Does this mean that if PensionFundFoo invests in VCFundX as a LP, that PensionFundFoo never actually has to fork over cash to VCFundX to give to StartupZ? Does this mean SVB accepted PensionFundFoo's commitment to VCFundX as collateral and gave a loan to VCFundX to invest in StartupZ?
Yeah, more the latter. VCFundX goes out and raises capital for a new fund, which includes PensionFundFoo as one of the LPs, and once closed, goes to SVB and says, 'hey look we have $100M in signed LP commitments for this fund we just closed' and SVB says 'great - we'll set up a line of credit for you at [x]% of that $100M that you can draw down now (or later) to do with what you want' (obviously to invest in startups, but that would also include their management fees which GPs can pull forward and use to fund their lifestyles and/or invest). And then the future capital calls from LPs, including PensionFundFoo, go to SVB to pay down any amount of that loan outstanding.
The majority of VCs use this product simply to help smooth working capital needs and to be able to make new investments without needing to call capital sooner than LPs would prefer (also to juice IRRs), but there's almost certainly some minority that have basically taken an advance on their entire fund size, or at least a large portion of it. And now any of that cash still held at SVB is obviously at risk.
> "The pioneers of personal computers including Jobs, Kapor, Lampson, Roberts, Kaye, are all great people but I don’t think any of us will merit an entry in a history book."
I don't think that will prove true for Mr. Gates or Mr. Jobs.
The list is interesting. Jobs or Gates, of course. Lampson, HNers will probably know from his important CS research such as on distributed systems - he'll be mentioned in those sort of history books, although not generalized ones. Kapor: I have to think for a while before I can finally pin him as 'Mitch Kapor, inventor of the spreadsheet'. Extremely important to business and economics and the modern world, almost as important as double-entry bookkeeping, but I don't think Luca Pacoli or double-entry books are mentioned in most history books so probably not. 'Kaye', I have no idea, unless it's a typo for '[Alan] Kay', in which case he could well be in the history books. Finally, 'Roberts'; I had no idea and had to ask Google, and apparently he's the Altair guy, Ed Roberts. The Altair doesn't seem all that important so I could see history books skipping over it and him. So of the 6 (including Gates himself), 3 probably would be, 2 will be in more specialized histories, and all would be featured in the most detailed histories or encyclopedias (indeed, all of them have Wikipedia entries).
> but I don't think Luca Pacoli or double-entry books are mentioned in most history books so probably not
They did in mine - important factor for the wealth of the Medicis and the northern Italian city states around the 14th/15th century as well as the Hansa league later on. Though I went to school in a European country so YMMV.
Kapor designed Lotus 1-2-3 (but didn't program it -- both parts were important for its success). Bricklin and Frankston created the spreadsheet with VisiCalc. There are claims of earlier spreadsheets on bigger computers, which I haven't really looked into.
I noticed that as well. If that's the case, it makes the reaction by Uber & Lyft seem much more reasonable. At the same time, it makes Uber & Lyft look like they did a poor job educating the public on these parts of the argument.
I followed the #Prop1 trend closely last night and there wasn't anything beyond fingerprinting mentioned by locals, news anchors, or even Uber / Lyft.
You should. I've had the same problem - subconsciously re-loading a site I've recently visited, realizing there is little/no new content on the front page, getting frustrated, and diving deeper in the hope of finding new tidbits.
By the time the cycle is done I've found nothing of value and wasted 3x the time normally spent.
[1] https://s201.q4cdn.com/589201576/files/doc_downloads/2023/03...